Recent advances in the telecommunications and electronics industry, and, in particular, improvements in digital compression techniques, networking, and hard drive capacities have led to growth in new digital services to a consumer's home. For example, such advances have provided hundreds of cable television channels to consumers by compressing digital data and digital video, transmitting the compressed digital signals over conventional coaxial cable television channels, and then decompressing the signals in the consumer's receiver. One application for these technologies that has received considerable attention recently includes video-on-demand (VOD) and everything-on-demand (EOD) systems where a consumer communicates with a service operator to request video content and the requested content is routed to the consumer's home for enjoyment. The service operator typically obtains the content from an upstream content provider, such as a content aggregator or distributor. The content aggregators, in this market stream, in turn, may have obtained the content from one or more content owners, such as movie studios.
While the video-on-demand market stream provides new opportunity for profits to content owners, it also creates a tremendous risk for piracy of the content. Such risk for piracy may arise at any place in the market stream that the content is exposed. Without appropriate protection, the content can be illicitly intercepted, stolen, copied, and redistributed, thus depriving content owners of their profits.
Current approaches to protecting the video content provide only partial or incomplete solutions. For example, one approach includes pre-encryption of the content before it's stored on a server at various locations in the market stream. However, once an aggregator, service provider, or customer wishes to view the content, it must be decrypted. Once the content is decrypted, it becomes exposed to potential piracy. Moreover, the content owner may be unable to determine where in the market stream the security breach occurred; thereby leaving the content owner vulnerable to future loses.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and system for providing end-to-end security of content in video-on-demand systems. It is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.